Hello, just wondering if anyone has anything to say about what recipe I might use to make cakes like you find in a chinese bakery. These are light and fluffy, not that sweet, usually filled and frosted with whipped cream and fresh fruit.

Google turns up some recipes of people trying to recreate the chinese bakery cakes. Some people use chiffon, some use a sponge cake with syrup. I’ve not made chiffon cake before and only made genoise twice.

The Chinese bakery cake is pretty mysterious, isn’t it? It tastes a lot like a chiffon to me, but they aren’t baked in tube pans! I asked Hector Wong about it, and he said it’s a biscuit de Savoie. I tried the recipe for biscuit de Savoie in The Cake Bible and syruped it, but it still doesn’t taste like what I get at the Chinese bakeries. Perhaps their recipe is different from Rose’s. I’m not sure.

Oh no…most definitely not the steamed sponge cake (ma la gao) commonly served as a dim sum item. We are talking about the Chinese birthday cake filled with fresh fruits and frosted with super stabilized whipped cream. I am Chinese and have eaten the Chinese birthday cake all my life. It’s definitely not the ma la gao. The closest thing to it is really chiffon.